Filmmaking stories

Set Design

Photo from Law & Order Criminal Intent. Vincent D’Onofrio as Det. Robert Goren and Katherine Erbe as Det. Alexandra Eames.

During my years in NY producing Law & Order Criminal Intent, I had many a hairy and stressful episode, but a few do stand out. You should always be wary of episode titles, like ‘On Fire’…

Criminal Intent was basically Sherlock Holmes of the NYPD. Our lead actor played a very strange, very smart and very entertaining detective who always (almost) got his man. The structure of the show moved to an extensive final, climactic scene; we always called it the ‘aria’ –a last scene that ran 7-10 pages with our hero and the suspects leading to the reveal of the killer. The brilliant Rene’ Balcer, L&OCI’s original Showrunner, always created a structure that used one main set, or world we would inhabit, and that would be the same place we would stage the aria.